Naturally, the board already has some advice. It recommends that the Pentagon gather more intelligence on other nations' AI capabilities, and develop "counter-autonomy" solutions. The military could deceive or overwhelm autonomous war machines, for example. Also, the writers suggest that the US pour many more resources into developing and testing learning AI, such as weapons that adapt to battlefield conditions. There's no guarantee that officials will heed the advice, or even that it's absolutely necessary.

It took a while for the US military to bolster its defenses against cyberattacks, and it looks like there's a similar deficit when it comes to artificial intelligence. A new Defense Department report says that the country needs to take "immediate action" to speed up its development of AI war technology. Academic and private research on AI and autonomous tech is well ahead of American forces, the study says. There's a real chance that we could see a repeat of what happened in cyberwarfare, where the US was focused so heavily on launching attacks that it left itself off-guard. Naturally, the board already has some advice.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Machine learning is nipping at the heels of conventional physical modeling of air quality predictions in more and more places. The latest is Johannesburg, South Africa, where computer engineer Tapiwa M. Chiwewe at the newly opened IBM Research lab is adapting IBM's air quality prediction software to local needs and adding new capabilities. The work is an expansion of the so-called Green Horizons initiative, in which IBM researchers partnered with Chinese government researchers and officials, starting two years ago. Last month, Chiwewe presented some of the Johannesburg lab's first results, involving ground-level ozone level predictions, at the 14th International Conference on Industrial Informatics in Poitiers, France. "You can do a lot of physics to understand how ozone is found in different places," he says, "but what we did is we just collected a lot of data and trained these machines on it and they were able to predict [local ozone levels] without any knowledge of how ozone works in the atmosphere."

Back in 1999, I read a great book by Bruce Sterling called "Distraction"; billed as a fictional view into the status of U.S. public service in the year 2044, the technology and cultural ideas packed into that book still resonate more than 15 years later. The book in part motivated me to strive to make a difference in public service, if only to avoid some of the more dystonia views in the book. Apparently I'm not the only one who found the book packed with ideas, Cory Doctorow also wrote a great review in 2008. The book's central premise: that all of us could suffer from "Distraction" from what really matters, especially in a world with 300 cable channels, 24/7 news, and always-on social media in the United States, is an idea that I'd like to explore more fully given our rapidly changing world of today. Technology is amoral, it is how we humans choose to use it that determines good vs. bad outcomes.

Germany's economy minister and vice-chancellor has defended flicking the middle finger to a group of right-wing protesters earlier this month. Sigmar Gabriel, who is Angela Merkel's second-in-command, said his only mistake was not using both hands. He said his critics should think about what they would do if faced with 12 "young, aggressive, swearing and ready-for-violence Nazis". Mr Gabriel was confronted by the hecklers in northern Germany. They called him a traitor of the people and mentioned his father's Nazi past.

NAIROBI – Japanese and African leaders on Sunday pledged to fight terrorism and emphasized the importance of rule-based maritime order as they wrapped up a Japan-led international conference on the continent's development. In the Nairobi Declaration adopted at the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), the leaders also agreed to promote investment in infrastructure that leads to job creation in the fast-growing region. The sixth TICAD, convened in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, was held outside Japan for the first time, as Tokyo seeks to strengthen its economic and political presence in the continent amid China's increasing influence. In the declaration, the leaders said they will seek to maintain maritime order based on rules, and strengthen security and safety at sea by international and regional cooperation in accordance with international law. The reference to maritime security comes as tensions remain high in the South China and East China seas amid China's growing assertiveness.

Hot on the heels of confirmed reports that China is getting ready to equip cruise missiles with artificial intelligence targeting capability, a "summer study" on autonomy done by the Defense Science Board shows that the U.S. has already been thinking of weaponizing artificial intelligence. The DSB is a federal advisory committee to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, also known as SecDef, a post currently held by Ashton Carter. He is also the CEO of the United States Department of Defense. According to the publicly available DSB study, it "offers important recommendations to identify the science, engineering, and policy problems that must be solved to permit greater operational use of autonomy across all warfighting domains." The report also outlines various projects that the government can undertake that will utilize the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics to automate several dangerous processes that are currently carried out manually, such as "offensive maritime mining" and "mine counter measure" missions.

Chasm Waxing is a cyber-techno-thriller. Twenty-somethings Becca Roberts and Josh Adler work for companies selected by the NSA's new Venture Capital firm. Conflict arises when the NSA Director uses the VC in a vendetta against ISIS. Josh's AI discovers the location of an ancient religious relic, drawing all three into a confrontation with a rising military/ political figure in the Middle East. Chasm Waxing is the first novel in the Chasm Trilogy. It's a realistic, apocalyptic, cyber-techno-thriller; ripped from today's headlines--projected into the year 2020.

For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution in Emile, his 1762 treatise on education. When looking for the rules of conduct in life, Rousseau found them "in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad." Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.